* Posts by Lee D

4232 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013

EE unveils shoebox-sized router to boost Brit bumpkin broadband

Lee D Silver badge

Re: To be honest no worse than the 1mb I get at the moment

Um... let's say you get 25Mbps each.

That's a 100 * 25 * some factor (probably 1/10 for standard contention). That's a 250Mbps leased line. They don't really do those so realisitically you're looking at a 1Gbps leased line, instead of a 100Mbps leased line.

That, on it's own, would cost more than £24000 to install if it involves digging up even one road. And then something like £1000 a month ongoing.

Not all 100 people would sign up.

The people installing it (Openreach as opposed to BT) would see much less than £20 of it.

Likely you'll give them £5-6000 a year. They wouldn't be able to afford to keep a leased line up.

On top of that, they'd have to provide you all with service from that cabinet, which means VDSL etc. modems in it, which means an upgrade costing probably about £10k or more again. Then they'd have to handle the other end of the leased line to give you several hundred megs of extra capacity.

And that's assuming they don't have to:

- Dig over a lot of other people's land, run a new cable ANYWHERE back to an exchange with gigabit+ connectivity, rent other people's ducting or install any new capacity.

- Rent out that pipe to another company on a fair an reasonable basis on demand from any of their customers.

- Pay anything at all for ongoing ground rent for the cabinets, ongoing maintenance, equipment, cables, ducts or access routes.

I despite BT/Openreach and have done my utmost to make them lose every piece of custom I can (including leased lines and dozens of telephone lines in a multitude of schools). But I can't say that it's at all cost-effective to give people the Internet service they desire as a private corporation. There's a reason they used to be nationalised and the costs amortized over decades and over the entire nation. Because that's what is required to do it.

And you're not even CLOSE to being "out in the sticks" where there may be no line at all, no cabinet at all, no existing ductwork at all (for kilometeres!), and no well-served exchange nearby (again, for kilometers).

The numbers don't add up. What we should have is a broadband tax that pays for kitting up locations once and for all. Literally FTTC / FTTH, with capacity (if not equipment) enough to go to 100's of Gbit in the future, that everyone pays for, which funds the rural installs that are otherwise completely non-viable.

Because at the moment, you'd be lucky to convince BT to throw you a leased line to your house for £24k and a couple of grand a month in most places that have inadequate broadband.

Case in point: A school just a few miles from Watford... £12k install costs + £10k own costs (we dug our own trenches across farmer's land and sunk fibre ducts of our own in co-operation to reduce their install costs) and £1k a month ongoing. For a 100Mbps leased line which wouldn't serve a street of people on VDSL let alone a town. Total distance - about 500 yards to connect to a cabinet that already existed on a major road with major links back to a central exchange.

The numbers rarely add up. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be making them happen anyway, once, well and for a long time, much like we did copper telephone lines at one time. The cost reductions of then everyone have VoIP capability, online government services, reduced reliance on broadcast TV/radio, etc. etc. would pay for itself eventually. But nobody is going to stump up billions to wire in people who have 1Mbps already, and go bankrupt in the process. That's how NTL's cables all ended up forming Virgin Media's cable network - the costs were already sunk into a bankrupt business.

Lee D Silver badge

As someone who just gave up on trying to get a landline with a decent speed broadband without paying the earth*... why not just do it yourself?

If you have 4G on your phone outside your house, you can just buy a tiny Wifi 4G router, and stick an antenna on it (alright, it might be wise to ask someone what antenna as you can exceed transmit limits if you're not careful, but places like Solwise sell off-the-shelf kit to do this).

Then buy any SIM from any provider and off you go.

I bought an Huawei thing. Pocket-sized. Takes any SIM. Provides Wifi to the whole house (2.4 or 5GHz). App controlled so you can block heavy users. Even has a microSD so you can offer centralised storage. Operates as a home router (so my Chromecast is on it and I can do full speed client-to-client traffic, etc.). Battery powered (but can be always-charging quite nicely). 6 hours on battery. Plugs into an antenna that cost me £20 which I stuck in a window (didn't need to, but noticeably makes things more reliable and faster).

I get 30Mbps at worst down now. People don't even realise it's 4G... ten people round the house playing online games / browsing and you wouldn't know. Plus things like TVPlayer, Netflix et al can be included in your data allowance with some people (Vodafone lets you pay £15 a month extra on top of a basic allowance for EVERYTHING - Amazon, Netflix, Google Play, Facebook, Youtube, etc. are all then excluded from data-allowances, Three do the same but for Netflix/TV Player, I'm sure most places have something similar).

And I can stick it in my pocket and take it on holiday to Europe with me, in the car, a friend's house, etc. without having to do anything special (roaming data included in my SIM deal). Month-to-month contract (could be cheaper if I signed up to 2 years, etc.). I can change the SIM at any time. I can even run up one SIM's data, switch SIMs and carry on with all my usual devices without touching anything but the Huawei box itself.

Basically this box is the "mobile hotspot" option of your smartphone, miniaturised. (In fact, my particular one is Android based, but you can't tell that because it has only a tiny little information display, no touch-screen, no buttons, etc. but it's basically "slap a cheap old smartphone into a box, put some custom software on it, sell it as a router".)

*BT's checker says I could get 3-4Mbps on ADSL and 5-10 on VDSL... bugger off, especially given the line's rental etc. Yep, I'm inside the M25 near a large town that's otherwise well serviced for Tube, rail, road, power, etc.

Bruce Perens wants to anti-SLAPP Grsecurity's Brad Spengler with $670,000 in legal bills

Lee D Silver badge

Re: You mess with the GNU ...

The licence clearly says:

"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."

If he's considered to be "sublicencing" the kernel GPLv2 code that he based his work on (by charging a subscription for a GPLv2-based work and cutting people's subscription to that if they exercise their given rights under the GPLv2 granted to them by the Linux kernel licence AND his modifications that must be GPLv2 too), or distributing it under some other scheme, then he's in breach of the licence.

It would be up to a court of law, but it's quite clear that he'd lose. You can sell it. You can't stop people who buy it from giving the source code away. And by imposing an outside restriction on a future subscription service based on you NOT being able to legally exercise the rights under GPLv2, then you are clearly modifying a contract with an external factor... which could be considered sublicencing by imposing foreign clauses not written in the GPLv2.

He wouldn't win.

P.S. you can't relicence the kernel. Hundreds of former contributors are dead and you'd need to trace every line of code they ever wrote and replace it with similar code under the proper licence. Additionally, there is absolutely no desire within the core kernel community to do so, there's a reason that "V2-only" was specifically chosen, they could have just used v2 which would allow a free "upgrade" to V3 at any point, but they specifically and categorically chose not to.

Plus, there's no need to. Nobody has ever proven a GPL weakness in any court in the world, and places like Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc. run in fear of the damn licence if they might be found to be on the wrong side of it. That tells you all you need to know.

Lee D Silver badge

Couldn't happen to a nicer company.

And if I remember, there was a psuedo-statement from Bruce/his lawyers that if GRSec stopped doing what they're doing, they wouldn't bother to chase the anti-SLAPP stuff and would just let it go. Specifically dropping the libel claims, not even having to actually fix the stupid licence/contract conflict.

Lee D Silver badge

The IBM vs SCO tactic.

Don't just win. Invalidate their patents. Bankrupt the company. Destroy all their claims. Get their copyrights invalidated. Chase the lawyers.

Sure, it cost IBM 10 times as much as it could have, but you can be sure that nobody else is going to try that tactic (though SCO are still going, somehow... but at this point there's nothing left and everything they do is costing the lawyers money because of their earlier fixed-price deal).

Jack in black: 12 years on, Twitter finally makes a profit from its firehose of memes and misery

Lee D Silver badge

When announcing a company "finally making a profit", I think it should be compulsory to tell us where that money's coming from.

I certainly don't pay Twitter anything.

Looking at my Twitter account, I see a tiny advert for Belvita biscuits, disguised as a twitter post, which I wouldn't click on in a billion years. That ad is a 1 minute streamed video which must take some production and backend infrastructure to serve to millions of users. Are Belvita really paying that much?

And I can scroll down for years, post tweets, view others, etc. without seeing many further ads (certainly no more than one tiny one a page, but like I say... I can scroll forever and zip between many pages without seeing anything else).

So... where are these mysterious millions/billions coming from? Who's paying that much to encourage me to buy a breakfast biscuit that I probably couldn't buy online without going to Tesco's or similar anyway?

It's no surprise that they are just haemorrhaging money.

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The dangers of a monoculture ..

Put a hardware switch on - great, now you can NEVER fix a bug in the bootloader.

Encrypt everything with a unique key? You still need to store the key somewhere and then decrypt and execute pretty much the same code for everything. The key being different doesn't help. Pretty much this is the TPM solution. It doesn't stop things being hacked, it just makes support, troubleshooting and repairs/replacement almost impossible (there's a reason that your Apple store will tend to bin your phone and just give you another of the same model).

None of that stops people finding flaws in the bootloader, attacking it, thereby getting access to things they shouldn't and using that to subvert the computer.

Lee D Silver badge

Cool.

I work in a school and we have a bunch of old manky iPad Mini's and the old iPad 2's that nobody would touch with a bargepole nowadays. Would be nice if I could convert them to run Android or something more useful now that they've been pushed onto an unsuitably high iOS version that slows them to a crawl (even pre- the battery life etc. issues that are now common knowledge).

I mean... I wouldn't pay for them, but I have a bunch of them that are going to go in the bin otherwise (literally not worth enough to bother selling them) and if I could turn them into digital-signage or a CCTV monitor, at least they would have got to do something useful for once in their life.

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Meh

Man-in-the-middle malware attacks.

ISPs have been caught modifying and injecting ads.

You can't do that on HTTPS. Not without flagging a bunch of warnings.

However, it does remove/destroy all the capacity of centralised caching (e.g. in workplaces) for simple things like images and static pages. But I can't say that's a bad part of the trade-off... pretty much the cacheability of websites has plummeted in recent years because of video, CDN, advertising, etc. anyway.

There's no reason NOT to encrypt. And a hundred TO encrypt.

Now if we could just worry about end-to-end encryption for all email, then we might actually be living in the 21st century a bit.

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Class Libel Suit anyone ?

"Most websites aren't businesses, and don't store customer data. Fuck Google."

What's that got to do with Chrome revoking Symantec certs?

If you had a cert, you were securing something.

If you didn't, you weren't.

Nobody is (yet) outlawing plain HTTP websites.

But with LetsEncrypt and things like auto-support in Apache, it'll only be a few years before HTTPS is the only accepted communication - which is no bad thing even for a personal website that most people have no idea of the hosting details of anyway. It means your website content can't be subverted by ISPs fiddling with your content/ads mid-transmission, as some have been caught doing.

With HTTP, literally any idiot along the route can slip some nasty Javascript or tracking code in that your visitors will be exposed to without your knowledge. With HTTPS, it takes something actually on their computer to do the same.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Class Libel Suit anyone ?

I've yet to see anyone even know how to add a certificate exception to Chrome... pretty much you can't do it as a limited user, and people don't know how. We have (finally) reached the point where people can't just click "Accept All" and then carry on spewing their details.

Hell... try replacing Google's certificate with anything else, most browsers will throw a fit because of certificate pinning, HSTS, etc. So, no, a broken cert is a broken website nowadays and people won't be putting their cards into it because it'll come up with dire warnings in any vaguely modern browser.

And nobody needs pay anything. LetsEncrypt lets you have free certificates accepted by any browser. But I'd be wary of a business that DIDN'T want to pay the pittance that SSL certificates cost in order to secure their customer data.

It's not Google that enforces this... it's any browser.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Class Libel Suit anyone ?

Given that the inclusion of a certain CA into a certain browser is almost entirely voluntary on the part of the browser itself, there's not much you can really do about it. They could decide not to include a CA "because they're a bit smelly" and there's little to no legal recourse. Stating an opinion on the security of a CA that issues mega-wildcard-certificates is something that anyone is quite able to do... and is ALWAYS going to be negative as they simply shouldn't be doing that if they want to be a respected and trusted CA.

The industry is about trust, not legal agreements. You don't want to use a CA that just has "a special deal" with Chrome to be included in their browser by default, I assure you. Lose the trust and you lose business. Because I bet a ton of people now won't touch Symantec or subsidiaries for a long time to come for their certificates.

If you don't like that, don't abuse the certificate processes. It's like a baker who's been snotting into the bread complaining that someone told on him and now nobody buys his bread.

Indiegogo to ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm: End of May... or we call the debt collector

Lee D Silver badge

“Firstly, we have decided we will no longer be silenced by the people who have orchestrated a campaign of harassment and credible threats against us."

Were you ever silenced? It's all I hear him whine about. P.S. Call the police in the case of a credible threat, or a solicitor. What that's got to do with customers, bailiffs and IndieGoGo (unless said threats were made on their forums, in which case why are you not saying they aren't dealing with them?) I can't fathom.

"The BBC report from yesterday is completely misleading. We have not been issued with an ultimatum by Indiegogo, in fact, we have been in dialogue with them for some time to discuss the harassment and serious threats, and they are very understanding of our situation.”

Correct - they haven't issued an ultimatum. They don't say that. They say they WILL. And I should hope you're in dialogue. Again, what that's got to do with product delivery or sending in the bailiffs, I can't fathom.

"She also alleged the Beeb had ignored an offer to interview 72-year-old David Levy"

And? So? What's that got to do with delivery of the product and/or sending in the bailiffs?

I'm not a backer, because I saw this one coming.

Try this:

Deliver the product. Or offer a refund.

Sue or have arrested people making credible threats. Or stop whining about them.

Deal with your customer's non-threatening complaints. Or stop whining about people complaining.

Dig out the paperwork that says that ex-director doesn't have any rights. Or pay him.

Oh, and file your returns.

It's really quite easy. Currently the only path I see is bankruptcy and you seem to have no care addressing that concern to your customers and would rather go bankrupt owing them all money than trying to give them something back.

I honestly don't care, I have no interest in the project and wouldn't touch it because I've learned to spot the slimy salespeople who do this (I skipped OpenPandora for the same reasons - I spotted that the guy in charge at the start wasn't ever intending to deliver, and then it turned into a shower of asking for more and more and more money and then delivering units only to whoever-paid-the-most instead of whoever-backed-from-the-start). I have no connection with ANY of the people mentioned. But you're running a slimeball business and using the same soundbites and distractions that I'd expect if you were one of those people who just runs the company into the ground, takes their percentage, runs, screws over all the customers (and most of your own staff), and then sets up elsewhere on something else to try it again.

If you want to combat that image, make the choices above. If you don't, but carry on with the "oh, we're being harassed", "it's all that guy's fault", etc. distractions/excuses, then you're quite possibly going to end up in court, maybe even jail, and I and many others certainly will have nothing to do with ANYONE so named as being on this project ever again.

If you had a shred of decency, the next blog update wouldn't be a rant. It would be a stating of the situation, a reasonable date by which you will guarantee delivery or refund, and an apology.

I don't see that happening, though.

Boffins crack smartphone location tracking – even if you've turned off the GPS

Lee D Silver badge

Gosh, it's almost like if you let a piece of software collect lots of unnecessary data and then upload it to some random place on the Internet, that someone could use this against you in some way.

Seriously... fine-grained permission control. Why are air pressure and heading not protected by a permission? Because there's no "you must ask for permission" blanket default before a "you must grant permission" user-authorised exclusion when that data is requested.

And users are stupid and don't understand that a walking app doesn't need to know your air pressure.

Honestly, any combination of more than 2 or 3 permissions is a warning sign, and things like "requires Internet access" isn't fine-grained enough. MAKE APP MAKERS SPECIFY TARGET DOMAIN NAMES.

PC's are rapidly moving towards web-services contained within the browser DOM model on the local PC, apps are the equivalent of installing a Flash plugin. It's a backwards step.

Sorry, but you get the bare minimum of permissions to do the task at hand, the default should be "no" for everything, and users should be able to say "Pretend I've given it the permission, but just send it fake data" (e.g. The flashlight app wants webcam access? Sure. Send it some white noise.). But, to be honest, rather than propagate the Vista UAC debacle into every mobile phone on the planet, let's just stop making programs that require those permissions and refuse them at the app-store. Literally force the writers to publish something like an SELinux capability report, down to port numbers, domain names, and format of information sent, individual permissions for everything (there should be no "you need to ask for camera access to turn on the flashlight" as is/was common), which is then audited for necessity, and any warning that pops up EVER on any phone that it's breaching those capabilities result in its being blacklisted as an app.

Without it? You're in a blank sandbox filled with false info no matter what you request.

Long haul flights on a one-aisle plane? Airbus thinks you’re up for it

Lee D Silver badge

I have had journeys where it would take 2 hours + to get to Gatwick... not from anywhere, just between the motorway and the airport.

I have had journeys where it takes 2 hours to GET to security / passport control. Not THROUGH it. Just to it (e.g. when landing at Stansted coming back from ANY country). Park in the long-stay and you can add another plane ticket / taxi ride to the price. Oh, and that can take 45 minutes to get you from your car to the airport or vice versa on a bus that fires everyone's luggage at you at regular intervals.

I have had journeys where I sat on the tarmac for several hours without explanation. I've boarded several hours late. I've had luggage that didn't arrive for an hour or more after I was standing at the collection point.

I literally wouldn't chance a flight any more if I only had an ordinary weekend to do it in. I also live in West London, for reference. Though it's possible to do, I could quite easily lose the entire weekend and achieve nothing just as easily. At least if I drive, there's a good chance I can just turn off and go home / do something productive if something goes wrong (and I get a LOT of pre-warning of that, generally).

Cost? Yes, it costs more. But the flexibility that comes with that is enormous. Roadside food? Who needs that? I don't have to sneak a entire tureen of soup past airport security, so it barely matters, I can load the car up with food for the journey down, and then French cheese for the way back. Pull into a village, park up, go to a proper cafe not a motorway service station (one of my concerns with flying - airport food or no food). Ferries/tunnels equate to flight costs. Tolls, yes, but it's not prohibitive - just avoid motorway if you're that worried (been there, done that). Fuel is the concern, but like I say, you can easily cost that out against feeling like a caged hen for 4 hours+. My work time costs more than a tank of fuel for 4 hours, my pleasure time sure as hell is worth more.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Money

And I can't help but think that if you scrapped business class, shoved everything together, and evened out the legroom to something sensible, you could get MORE passengers on the same plane.

Sure, they wouldn't be paying a thousand pound for a fancy seat, but maybe more people would WANT to fly in them, and the businessmen wouldn't be too upset about having only decent-legroom rather than their own personal box.

P.S. I judge any company that flies their staff business class. If I were an airline, I'd make all my staff fly economy. But then, my economy would be adequate rather than prescribed torture barely above legal limits. Eat your own dog-food.

Lee D Silver badge

Gave up flying several years back.

Sorry, but I'd honestly rather have a silent trip (if we can scrap the safety announcement or make it so that people who WANT it can plug in headphones to hear it and the rest of us can just ignore the silent hand-waving in front of us, I'd be even happier), some legroom (suggesting that you have ANY legroom nowadays is really just being a liar), not be sold-at for hours on end, and be slightly further from the sniffing, scratching, yelling, etc. of other passengers. Absent that, I just won't fly. To be honest, the extra cost of a couple of tanks of fuel in a modern car and a cheap ferry / Eurotunnel crossing (where you can get out and walk around, even) is almost lost in the noise of the extra comfort. (Hey, I gave up on the US years ago, I certainly don't care that I wouldn't be able to get there).

Question: Why does my car have more legroom than a plane? And more storage? And better seats? And better entertainment options? And better comfort options (heaters, fans, A/C, etc.)? And a nicer seating angle / reclining capability? And a better view? And better cup-holding etc. facilities? And nicer belts (I know, I know, that one has an answer, but stlll)? And such things are all static items that could, in theory, be fitted to a plane and the cost amortized over thousands of flights, I don't imagine they are any heavier than an airplane seat. Seriously... a proper tray that doesn't rely on the guy in front not bouncing around would be nice (not that you even get a meal nowadays either). An armrest you can put an arm on. A pocket for rubbish. Seat controls to adjust. Places to plug things in to charge, etc. Even my rear passenger seats offer all that, and you could make them into a long row just the same as on any plane. Three car passenger seats probably aren't even the same width as three plane seats. They certainly don't go as high. And I could easily put a bag in the footwell better than I can in a plane.

Given that you can stop a car at any point, open the windows, travel for just as long as on a plane (hell, I've done 9 hours straight to Scotland before now), and they do SO MUCH BETTER a job at attending to my comfort, I can't see why a plane couldn't... it's literally just penny-pinching. Charge everyone a fiver more for those hundreds of passengers flying thousands of flights every year and put in some decent seats.

I can't bring myself to use them any more. On top of things like the stupid queues, security processes, time expectations (it's literally lose-a-day to get to Spain, it's not much more to drive!), preparations, baggage restrictions, flight timings, travel to the airport, car parking, etc. I just don't see that they are any use to me any more.

But whenever I jump in my car and go off on holiday, wherever around Britain or abroad, I "feel" on holiday the second I start, I can stop off anywhere I like whenever I like, I can change plans on a whim, come back with a whole boot full of presents, etc. etc. and take four people along with me (which drastically cuts the cost to less-than-a-plane - four tanks of fuel is a LOT of travelling). Priority boarding? We know that as "calling shotgun". We can chat. We can play games. We can watch movies. We can fall asleep (well, most of us can). And we can pull into that little sleepy French village that's got a fair on today.

Airlines have worked tirelessly to screw me over as much as humanly possible, to the point that I actually believe the allocated legroom and "you can't leave the flight because we're delayed so you're locked in a tin box for the next three hours on the ground" should be illegal. I can't see why I'd reward them with even a pittance of money, or the air travel taxes, or airport purchases just so they can do that to me. Going on holiday is no longer exciting if it involves air travel, especially if I have a child in tow. I can't think why I'd subject myself to it again.

It never used to be like that.

South Wales cops crow about facial recognition arrests on social media

Lee D Silver badge

Sure, it's a detection method.

But does it constitute evidence? I'm guessing not.

It's no different to, say, pulling over a red Ford Fiesta because one was just involved in a burglary. You might catch them with a handful of silver and a box of tools, but more than likely you'll find a lot of scared and innocent people just going about their business. Without other evidence of actual criminality (i.e. actually tying the person captured into the original incident with OTHER evidence than "you look a bit like him"), it's no better than a poor-man's identity parade (which are embarrassingly worthless).

As such, I don't see that it's worth spending that amount of money on, and likely that will become true as the stats for how much time was wasted / how many false-arrest claims are filed by relying on it.

Sure, you'll get the odd tug where the guy with the red Ford Fiesta / face that look like that also has a bunch of stuff on him that he shouldn't, but presumably no better or worse than random chance if you had bothered to search anyone on the street.

And carnivals etc. wouldn't be the best place to use it. I'd imagine city nightclubs would be much better - smaller training database but much more likely to catch the ones sneaking back in after being barred from the other club up the road, etc. I don't think those kinds of places use such things, though, relying instead on large scary men at the door to stop people entering anyway, so you might as well utilise their memory and instincts anyway.

Honestly, if facial recognition were this good, we wouldn't need the police much at all. I can offer you myriad images of clear faces of people wanted for committing illegal acts. They are called the "wanted by police" lists. Strange, then, that they don't get flagged up in Birmingham the second they walk past any camera, for a crime they committed in Glasgow. You know why? We don't have that kind of infrastructure and capacity, and even if we did, the false positives would render the system useless in seconds.

CableLabs signs off MAC spec for DOCSIS full duplex

Lee D Silver badge

Re: What difference does it make what wifi router you put on it?

More bandwidth = more simultaneous clients.

There are probably at least 8-9 devices in the average family household connected to wifi. Phones for mum and dad, the kids tablet, dad's laptop, the Xbox, the Wii, the Chromecast, etc. etc. etc.

800Mbps is thus only about 80Mbps per device. That's only 8Mbytes/sec (roughly) for downloading their new 50Gb update to their XBox game, for instance.

Plus... if you buy kit that's capable of the higher speeds, you not only get lower bandwidth, but you're playing nicely with everything else that has those higher speeds (so instead of 10 devices all fighting and taking their percentage of overhead, they know to dial back and the one client needing more gets it). Latency is also a factor, plus that wireless is very noisy (so 1Gbps theoretical means you have more room for errors and retransmissions before you do start to affect the connection).

Don't forget, a 4K stream, sucks up 25Mbps per second (according to Netflix). Say ten houses share 10Gbps. Now you have 1Gbps. That house has 8-10 devices. Each get 100Mbps on average. Add in noise, retransmission, upstream-and-downstream latency, broadcast traffic, interference from neighbouring networks, etc. You're now into less than they'd have got from a local Ethernet cable 20 years ago. Given that we're all using cloud for everything from home photos to school work to streaming movies, it quickly disappears. And the kids downloading the new maps for GTA V could easily knock the connection for six for an hour or more (I've yet to see ANYONE but myself run a router capable of proper QoS and fair airtime sharing, and it's trivially easy to knock someone off their games just by doing a large torrent or similar).

And this is a protocol that you expect to be using 20+ years from now, too. Some hangers-on will still have whatever modems support this sitting in their living room long after everyone else has upgraded to terabit-internet, and they still need to do a half-decent job.

Like the infamous (and apocryphal) quotes... 10Gbps should be enough for anybody. And there's only a need for a handful of computer in the entire world, right?

To be honest, it all depends on your usage. I can run a school with 500 pupils off a 100Mbit leased line. But every member of staff probably has 75-100Mbps connections to their home, with an order of magnitude less devices dangling off it. And I guarantee you that their home connection is like treacle compared to the school one. I bet their iPhone gets a faster individual connection on 4G than on their Wifi too, once all's said and done.

By the time this hardware is out, everyone will be on 5G and, embarrassingly, it'll outperform their home broadband. If they want to be able to keep up, the DOCSIS cable standards, or the latest DSL standard, have to be able to deliver 5G speeds times by the average number of devices in a household (to combat interference from the neighbour's devices too, even if they are idle), after all the losses, conversions, interference, channel-congestion, etc. Or else people will literally stop bothering buying home broadband.

Case in point: I don't have a home broadband connection. I bought a Huawei 4G router, slapped a high-data-usage monthly recurring SIM into it, and I pay less than a BT line would cost, get all the data I need, at speeds twice those quoted for a BT line in my inside-the-M25 new house, with no commitment, no installation, and deals like "Netflix doesn't count towards your data allowance", etc. And I can pick it up and take it round a mate's house because it's about as big as the cheapest of smartphones and lasts 6 hours on battery.

This DOCSIS standard, if anything, doesn't go far enough.

This is why we can't have nice things, BT tells Global Services after 3% sales droop

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Lets all bash the British company

- Insisting on keeping copper isn't a problem. The problem is that the copper isn't backed by anything at the exchange. VDSL over copper can do amazing things, way more than they actually ever achieve, and nobody is dictating what happens past the cabinet.

- Wholesale cost BB? You mean more than just about every developed country while providing much less in return? BT have had DECADES of opportunity to get their costs down by doing the above.

- "Not insisting VM and altnets also wholesale to encourage demand led installation" - given that almost all that consists of is NTL's bankrupt cable business, and Hull's sole ISP, that's not something you can just regulate. If you did, you'd be forcing OpenReach to take it all on, and providing new installs too. Pretty much the bit that's not happening is new installs, VM rarely cover any area at all that isn't already well covered by BT/OR cabling.

- "not enforcing standards based fibre installation to ensure we see the same standard of fibre installations across the nation permitting access level competition for all installs not just BT wholesale" VM is DOCSIS3. BT chose VDSL. Both are well-established standards. Everything else doesn't matter as it's IP transit... the beauty of IP is nobody cares what box is at either end so long as it talks IP. ISPs haven't had to have banks of modems, one per active customer, for decades.

"At least they pay uk taxes and are accountable to uk rules and regs, which is not the case with VM owned by US giant Liberty Media off the back of debt acquired by the smaller cable operators who pay(ed) little to no tax due to paying interest and repayments on previous loans which may now not be in the UK anymore thereby dodging taxes on profits the loan company (LM subsidiary or close related business) may make."

They bought up businesses with the only asset being a cable in the road and enormous debt. Pretty much penalising them because they're not English is about the worst argument you can make (where are all the British-operated companies putting in new connections or buying up the NTL stock? Oh, that's right, nowhere...)

I'm far from a nationalist (I think it's silly to blindly cheerlead for an entire nation just because you were an accident of its geography). But all I see is a shitty long-term, ex-nationalised UK company messing up the entire industry for everyone via monopolistic practices, and the only serious rival being foreign. I know what that tells me about my nation.

And I've dealt with more than enough "highly skilled" installation, civils and management people for BT/OR to know that I'd rather they were on the dole queue and having to prove their utility rather than the shitshow we get at the moment.

You want a fix? Nationalise Openreach. Make the infrastructure government-paid-for, force it to provide a line upon request within a year wherever the person is in the country, charge a standard rate to everyone to cover the long-term costs of everything. ISPs then provide the IP service at the other end. Like it used to be... get a telephone line from a government department, but who you pay for phone calls is up to you.

No need to standardise on one tech. No need to scrap copper. No need to steal the business of the only rival who has their own infrastructure, or pay off their debts for them. Unless, of course, they go somewhere you don't (vanishingly rare) in which case you might want to buy a deal with them rather than them have to buy a deal with you.

And every time you build / repair a road or pavement... put a tube full of fibres along it and a cabinet at every junction point.

Increased internet costs for everyone for 5 years. Then everyone with access to broadband. Then a highly-redundant and high-capacity network to back it all. Then no "separate line rental". Then no BT install farce. Then you can call it a utility like any other.

Apple: iPhone sales are down (but they've never been more lucrative)

Lee D Silver badge

Apple are a designer brand.

Note that this has nothing to do with actual "design" (don't get me started down that path with Apple products).

People pay to have the Apple name. Same as Beats headphones, Nike trainers or Calvin Klein underwear.

I'm under no illusion that that is what's happening, and neither (I suspect) are most Apple buyers. But it's something that would drive me insane if a company that I actually used did so.

But, to be honest, I have never once cared about designer brands, chosen a brand "just because it's that brand" (though by chance I have a number of Samsung devices - printers, TVs and phones - that I'm very happy with, none of them big-name items or expensive smart things) or any celebrity endorsement, or even "what other people have".

Lee D Silver badge

To be honest, I'd be really worried about that.

You're selling LESS THINGS.

Making MORE MONEY.

Which means those things you sell are either cheaper for you to make than before, or you're selling them for higher prices than before.

Either way, you're screwing your customers harder for the same product, when you could quite easily reduce prices or reinvest it. That would rile me, if I'd ever purchased a single Apple product in my entire life (I manage thousands... but I don't purchase them, and never would for personal use... and even the ones I manage we're phasing out because of an entire series of Apple support stupidity incidents where they literally couldn't care less about our business).

And even I notice a trend in bad quality updates (iOS on iPad now takes several revisions to "get right" every time something goes wrong, MacOS is being phased out entirely, etc.) and culling of hardware lines of late.

Here's hoping the trend continues until people realise they've bought an empty box for $2000 and start a revolt.

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Rule One...

Nope.

Rule #1: START polite and reasonable.

When you then don't get a reasonable response, you escalate accordingly.

Each new person that it gets escalated to, you give the benefit of doubt, explain again, start over.

But, to be honest, sometimes there is no alternative but to get arsey with people when they can't fulfill a reasonable request.

Cases in point:

- IKEA: "No, we can't refund your faulty product and the remaining unopened products of the same type, just one day after you bought them from this store because we don't stock that model any more". Let me assure you, you will. I had to assemble an entire unit inside the complaints department, shoving customers out of the way to do so, to get the right attention for this one.

- Apple: "Sorry, we won't allow you to make more than 5 Apple ID's a day, despite you having 500 iPads on-site and us having this conversation for four years in a row and always allowing it before, no we won't put that in any form of writing (e.g. email), oh, by the way I'm the 'Head of written complaints'"

- Three: "We're going to charge you for a phone that never arrived, that you phoned up to block because it never arrived, that the contract for it was in the same parcel so you could never have signed, and then when you cancel the DD via the bank because we refused to do so, we'll threaten you with a lawsuit and then phone you 30 times in one day to chase you for the money" - Strangely, I've been threatened with no end of lawsuits and even offered to initiate a few on their behalfs, and never once appeared in court or lost the argument...

Data-by-audio whizzes Chirp palmed £100k to keep working with EDF

Lee D Silver badge

I'm more worried that they are happier to deploy some proprietary data-transfer algorithm over an unknown and unreliable medium...

Than if they, say, had properly isolated and protocol-specified networks (i.e. don't talk TCP/IP to sensors... get them to talk a very, very, very limited protocol which literally can only send back a temperature and nothing else) over any medium you like.

Hell, optical isolation would seem to be best, not sound-based. But what matters is not just joining everything to IP networks but having limited, purpose-built interfaces over whatever media... like trying to talk serial over a serial cable isn't compromisable by IP alone unless you have an IP->serial gateway somewhere.

Try not building nuclear reactors that are just bog-standard SCADA systems connecting everything to the net over the same cables, and then you don't need to worry about fancy new locked-in reinventions of the ZX Spectrum tape-loading routines.

Crowdfunding small print binned as Retro Computers Ltd loses court refund action

Lee D Silver badge

Well, if those statements to the court from the company prove anything, it's that c**ks are involved and to steer well clear of any company that does business like that or answers the court like that. They couldn't even be bothered to turn up, which is probably most of the reason the guy won.

Hopefully, this tanks the company good and proper as everyone else follows suit.

Saw it coming from miles off, by the way. Mad Speccy fan (I owe three real ones, one with modified UHF modulator to output over composite cable, etc.). Mad crowdsourcing fan (also steered clear of the OpenPandora for similar reasons - but had several GP2X I used to program for - and have backed all kinds of other crowd-sourced stuff). Took one look at this and said "Nah".

My next prediction - that Psion-revamp thing will similarly tank.

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Lee D Silver badge

"So the use of jamming devices is an offence – but possession of a device is not. "This means that courts have to prove intent to use, which can be difficult" said the report."

I have never understood that kind of law. I remember the same about small FM transmitters and TV-senders that operated on licenced frequencies.

If it's ILLEGAL to actually use for the intended purpose, how can you legally sell them? Even guns... you can't sell a gun that can actually fire, you have to legally nobble it if you're selling it "not intended for use", etc.

Surely if you need a licence to operate it, you should have to show that licence to purchase it?

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Lee D Silver badge

You would think that before decommissioning kit like that, they'd have some kind of emulation environment, or even just revision control so they could get it back. If anywhere is suddenly going to need to boot up 50-year-old code, modify it and need to get it right first time, it's NASA surely?

I'd even expect them to patent some standards for how to describe the communications a satellite could use, and store and archive those protocols for future use, and with SDR and similar nowadays, surely it can't be that hard to "backtrack" and put out a signal towards anything that you want to use?

I mean, sure, I wouldn't expect them to overwrite their on-board firmware day one with a fix, but at least establish a handshake and send some diagnostics back down the line with a few simple commands, no?

Maybe it's time to patent a standardised method of communicating via radio, including descriptions of frequencies, timings, protocols and algorithms used, etc. so that NASA mission control equipment can just run a certain bundle on a certain antenna to talk to a certain craft, and that'll work today or 50 years into the future.

Maybe you should've stuck with NetWare: Hijackers can bypass Active Directory controls

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I'm missing...

If someone can figure out how to turn it into a viable attack before Microsoft can fix it, it doesn't really matter whether they privately disclose it first or not. Someone, somewhere will have found it and be attacking it, or will be paying VERY close attention to the CVE entries etc. the second they are registered and poking around anything they think related.

A whitehat holding onto a critical exploit is no better than a blackhat doing the same, the risk is just the same, and there's no way to tell which they are (or indeed whether they are both... taking the glory for discovering/fixing it while secretly being the guy selling it to the baddies and profiting both ways).

Fact is, you need admin rights anyway. Already game over.

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Maybe

Agreed on the net neutrality thing but on a mobile network, I think you'll find it's always been there. For a long time, anything like Skype etc. was dialled down compared to other access, presumably because it's competitive but you could reasonably argue that the real-time requirement isn't suited to what should be "data sent in the gaps" between their own real-time data (i.e. phone calls).

Nowadays, not so much of that goes on, but if I was unhappy I could move to any other provider in seconds. Grab a SIM, slap it in. However, data usage limits are growing all the time (even if you exclude the "unlimited" offers) so it's not really a huge issue at the moment, I feel. Three do a package where only TVPlayer and Netflix are excluded - I can quite easily guess which company most people would go with, whichever one bundles the most. Nobody is going to just subscribe to a service purely on the basis that their ISP doesn't count it against them... it's the other way round, especially on mobile. They'll just move their number to a provider that doesn't penalise them for preferring a particular service.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Maybe

The base package is 50Gb / month. If you go with Vodafone, 50Gb/month is £30 (was £25 over Christmas) and you can pay a few extra quid and exclude all Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon Video, Google Play etc. (i.e. all the big-name sites) from such data usage.

To be honest, I have a steam account with 1000 games. I don't pull anywhere NEAR that as you just can't play that amount of huge games that quickly and keep them all up-to-date.

Sure, you have to be on the right package, but the right package can be £20 a month if you buy a year's contract and buy it at the right time.

Sorry, but with install charges, line rental, etc. any home broadband is significantly more expensive and there are fixed-line ISP's out there giving you less than 50Gb a month without any possibility of exclusions!

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Maybe

I moved to a flat in a major town you've heard of, inside the M25 recently.

No Virgin available. BT checkers all told me that the best I could get with VDSL ("fibre") was 6Mbps.

Sod that, I didn't even try.

Bought a Huawei 4G router, and a cheap data-only SIM. Can easily get 30-50Mbps throughout the peak periods and it covers the house. No line rental, no stupid charges, no installation cost, 30-day contract (though I could get it slightly cheaper if I went for a 12-month contract, or I could just retain the ability to change the SIM to someone else at any point, which I prefer). Even the latency is low enough to game over.

Plus it's battery backed, I can carry it around in my pocket, and certain services (e.g. video from Netflix / TVPlayer) are unmetered and don't count towards my data allowance (which I rarely get close to anyway).

Rather than a £50+ a month for a TV + landline + broadband deal, on an 18-month+ contract, involving engineer visits and boxes and wiring, I have broadband + I use a mobile phone anyway (or WhatsApp or Skype or whatever I want) + free streaming TV on a month-by-month contract that I can change to any provider I like.

So far, it's been two months and I can't fault it. It also means if I go for a long car journey, I get to take it and connect my laptop the other end, etc. on the same package. Hell, it even has European roaming for free too.

I don't get how BT are supposed to be competing against that with their current offerings. Some woman from a broadband company that the letting agency want me to use phoned up and couldn't compete either. And if I am ever skint, I just cut it off and carry on with the paltry data on my mobile package (because I rarely use data from my phone) and "top it up" next month instead.

Hell, I bought a bigger antenna for it since then, given that it's saving me so much money.

Dodgy parking firms to be denied access to Brit driver database

Lee D Silver badge

Re: dodgy parking companies

For all the fuss people make about parking, I have literally never had a problem.

Mainly because, if they have stupid rules or payment systems, I just don't park there. I'll literally park miles away and walk instead, or just not bother.

I'm sure that this attitude achieves only one of two things a) the landowner gets what they intended and I don't park there, b) the landowner loses out on potential revenue because they're overbearing and I don't park there.

Neither of which I really want to change.

For instance, in any of the towns I go to, I have a nominated car park that I always park in because they are the one that don't have stupid junk. Ticket-in, ticket-out ones are normally the best, because then I have a timed, dated, stamped, paid receipt (and now that the TITO ones also auto-recognise your number plate you get to keep the receipt more often than not). Pay-and-display are open to interpretation, abuse, etc. but with a TITO one you can't argue about when I arrived, when I left, and you can't go around sniffing every car to see if you can pull it for being a second over because the ticket isn't even on the car anyway. There's almost no point patrolling a TITO car park, except to find abandoned cars (which will flag immediately on your database anyway after 24 hours, so you know exactly what you're looking for).

Plus, I have a dashcam for this purpose too. I even like to park near the signs if I'm forced to use a pay-and-display so that I can get those on camera too.

To be honest, though I don't doubt there are unscrupulous people, those are easily combated by the vaguest use of a personal record of any kind. Everything else, like speeding fines, is an idiot tax on people who park where they know they aren't supposed to. I still chuckle every time I see someone arguing with a traffic warden despite clearly being in the bus lane / on the double-yellows / etc.

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

Lee D Silver badge

Deployed an MSI package with a space in the filename to an RM Curriculum Connect 3 school network.

All CC3 software packages are installed as an ordinary MSI, just with paths to things like shared icons, configuration files, etc. put on certain drive letters. Educational suppliers would often supply them if bothered, but they were easy enough to make yourself and you could also use their "Discover" software (which was basically just Wininstall with knobs on) to create one for any bit of software. All the complicated bit went without a hitch, and I got a working MSI. Decided to rename it something sensible before deploying it.

Put it into the management console thing, pushed it out to a handful of test machines (I'm not stupid!), left for the day.

Came back in to someone screaming that everything was down and they'd had to call out RM support. Turns out, if you had a space in the filename (and we're talking Windows XP/Vista here), their crappy software that decided WHAT packages to install couldn't parse the list and so the next time ANY computer (including the server) rebooted it, it would crash on boot while that software ran to see if it needed to install anything. Literally took down every client on the network, plus the server when some bright spark thought they'd restart it.

They tried to blame me but literally NOT ONE WARNING to the effect of "don't use spaces" existed in the documentation, not one check in the deployment software, nothing, at the time. But, hey, they released a patch pretty damn quickly after effectively having to rebuild every client and patch up the server to remove that package from the list. P.S. after the patch... the package I made worked flawlessly for years.

Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

Lee D Silver badge

Macs were never servers.

I have two Mac Mini "servers" (as sold to my employer) sitting next to me. I mean... come on... one hard drive, not even proper RAM, nothing. You couldn't rely on them to do anything at all. And if the only difference was a £25 software upgrade, you know they aren't going to be anything special. That's pretty much why they had to buy two... just in case one went pop.

Literally, I turned one off several years ago because at that point MacOS clients could directly join to LDAP without all the OpenDirectory / golden-triangle junk. The other is kept running because it supervises our iPads but even that I'm regretting (and, in fact, we're scrapping iPads too). If I could, I would gather them all in, wipe them all out and supervise them on an online service (Google Apps lets you do it).

Neither devices were my choice of hardware, but certainly classing anything Apple as "a server" is a complete lie. And, yes, I have had RAM and disk failures in them.

Good riddance to a complete misuse of the word server.

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Lee D Silver badge

Re: C64 Joysticks

Daley Thompson's Decathlon cost me two Sinclair Interface Two's, two edge connector repairs and no-end of joysticks.

Damn game.

And only because it was the closest I ever got to playing Hyper Sports, which I used to coo over because it looked so fun (hint: still is, but the weightlifting event is just RIDICULOUSLY difficult).

Ex-staffer sues UK's DWP, claims superior blabbed confidential medical info

Lee D Silver badge

I've worked in plenty of places were people were let go for being off-sick long-term.

If you're off-sick it means you're not fit for work.

If you're not fit-for-work long-term, then it means you shouldn't be doing that kind of work and they shouldn't be insisting you do.

Just because people run scared of actually acting doesn't mean you don't have an easy and obvious legal recourse to say bye to them. You just have to make sure you're not doing it out of spite and that you give them reasonable recourse in case everything they have ever told you about why they were off happens to be true, and maybe even that there's more that they don't want to share with you for personal reasons.

Of course, this leaves some scope for abuse, but you can do precisely nothing about that. In the same way that you don't know if someone returning a product actually genuinely couldn't get it working or whether they just want their money back because they overspent at Christmas. It's all part of the cost of doing business.

More worrying is that, if one person is off-sick, it means your office/department comes to a grinding halt. That's not a well-planned business.

Hint: I basically never have a day off work. I think my last sick-leave was about 8-10 years ago. Before that, it would be another 8-10 years. So if anyone was going to be upset about people malingering with illness, it should be me.

But as the guy says - not my business, so I don't care. If someone gets more money than me, more holiday than me, more responsibility than me, a better job title than me, more days off than me, or whatever... good luck to them. If I think I'd getting a duff deal overall, I'll be sure to speak up, don't worry. But if they've negotiated a better deal, kudos to them. It doesn't mean I MUST be given exactly the same, as I have no knowledge of the differences in situations.

This is my biggest problem with unionisation, by the way, the concept that everyone is equal which means they all get top wages for doing the lowest-common-denominator of work. I've never been a member of a union, as I negotiate my own salary and conditions. Strangely, that means I'm often under onerous NDA's with my employers for getting a better deal than anyone else (and as part of my job I see, manage and have to manipulate salary etc. data so I know I'm not being fibbed to but equally know that even if I found out something that way, it's none of my business as I was only processing that data and couldn't act upon it).

I think the childish jealousy of "he gets paid more", "she works less hours", "why doesn't HE have to do X", etc. is what tears apart a team much more than any disparity. You know what? The people I see who get the biggest raises etc. more often than not work harder for it, suck up more for it, try harder to get it, and even ASK for it where the other people don't. If you don't ask, you don't get. Feeling hard done by? Ask for a raise. The people I see who get stuck on a wage structure for decades are the ones who "never want to make a fuss".

Lee D Silver badge

And the perfect way to ensure the guy gets even more money out of the company, plus the opportunity to say "No, I still want to keep the job", plus cause everyone involved more hassle is to splat his private data around the team unnecessarily.

Nobody else need know WHY he was off, just that he was off. Almost every workplace I've ever worked in understood this... "off-sick" / "medical leave" / etc. is all you need to know.

The perfect way to encourage a malingerer is to hand them a £50k payout by being an idiot. The perfect way to lose the support of your team is to lose your own job because you spaffed the info everywhere, and still your team has to do the work but without the guy AT ALL, without you, with all kinds of HR hassle to boot, finding replacement staff, and having £50k+ taken out of the salary budget to compensate him.

If you've got the job title that includes "manager" this should be quite obvious.

Pro Evo-lution shocker: Samsung SSDs focus on endurance over capacity

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Endurance != Reliability?

That's my point...

Increasing speed is pointless.

Increasing durability is pointless.

We need them to do no more than produce a standard, small module, in massive quantities, and bring the price down. They can sell that module singly in a small drive, or thousands together in a humungous one. But until the cost per module comes down, they aren't practical and wasting money on FASTER controllers/chips isn't helping.

I'd be more than happy with whatever chip is in that several-year-old SSD, multiplied up to fill the box, and sold at a decent price. A 1TB Samsung cost me £300 several years ago. By the same token, a 15Tb one should cost £4500 max. In actual fact, it costs £7000 ($10k).

If they can't get the modularity, mass production, and scale correct, we are never going to get affordable SSDs. And I'd be happy for them to abandon HDD production to do so.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Endurance != Reliability?

Endurance and reliability are both within or exceeding the ranges that non-SSD drives do.

Speed too.

Capacity? Nope.

Price? Nope.

So why they would not bring down prices, or raise capacities, but give more endurance and speed? I can't fathom. Just STOP making traditional HDDs except for high-end server stuff if you really need to.

And, as an anecdote, I bought the cheapest, most useless SSD I could find for work machines. It's a Crucial thing that cost a pittance and just large enough to cover our base image. It makes all our machines FLY if they have them in there. Literally a bigger speed impact than double-RAM or five-years-newer processors. We bought them for machines that can't go above 4Gb because of motherboard restrictions (even though 64-bit Windows). They make a bigger difference that the ones we upgraded to 8Gb and beyond.

According to the Crucial Storage Executive software, the SSD in my IT-Office, always-on, only machine I use every day, remote-desktop-into-from home, everything-installed machine, lowest-of-the-low (so people can't say I'm using better kit than they are) reads thus:

Power On Hours Count: 2172 Hours (the disk has been in there a year, the machine is on 24/7, it's only been "powered on" for 3 months, by that number so obviously it powers down out of hours and in idle times).

Reallocated NAND Blocks 0 NAND Blocks

Percentage Lifetime Remaining: 97 Percent

Available Reserved Space: 100 % Spare Blocks Remaining

Total Bytes Written: 9.87 TB

It's 500MB/s read and write. Warrantied for three years (which they class as 80TB Total Bytes

Written for that drive). At current usage, it should give me.... another 8 years. I don't expect it to, it was cheap-as-chips, but it should, on average, overall, across my users. I don't think there's an hard drive that I'd trust for that length of time in active service.

P.S. I did nothing more than image the drive from the previous HDD - didn't change swap settings (and it's only 4Gb RAM), didn't put on over-provisioning, ignored all the software recommendations for caching, etc. so technically I'm really abusing it as an SSD and could get much more life out of it.

Sure, I wouldn't want to use it as a 24/7 CCTV-recording NAS or something, but that's more than adequate. We haven't had one fail. When we do, they're really cheap to replace.

But what I'd really like is something much, much, much larger even if that meant it came in 3.5" format. Cracking one open (they aren't hermetically sealed like HDD's) reveals that it's a little aluminium tin can with a tiny half-populated circuit board taking up about 1/3rd of a 2.5" drive on it. With no further effort, they could easily multiply capacity by six without having to even use different storage chips (maybe a different controller chip). My Samsung 850 EVO at home is the same. That's 1Tb but you could easily make it 4-6Tb in the same container. In a 3.5" drive? You could easily have a RAM-stick-like arrangement and put many dozens of Terabyte chips vertically on an horizontal controller board.

But it's the one area we don't seem to see SSDs growing in - actual capacity, or cost-per-capacity. Which, given that even commodity Windows PCs now come with SSD options, sometimes even by default, I can't fathom.

Stop faffing around and start making larger versions of what you have. I couldn't care less if it was even slightly slower than the current SSDs so long as it was lots faster than an HDD. And was affordable in the multi-Tbyte range.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Lee D Silver badge

Personally, I look at clock speeds now (as in real-world clock speeds, not theoretical maximum if you plunged it in liquid nitrogen) and most desktop Intel chips look pretty sad. There are mainstream computers out there that dial back down to 1Ghz or so.

At one point 3GHz was the norm, 4GHz was possible, but we don't see improvements on those kinds of speeds any more. The top-of-the-line Intel chips are 4GHz. Hey, sure, lots of cores, but still 4GHz. We hit peak "speed" years ago. Then we took advantage of more "bandwidth" if you like (same speed but could do more at the same time). Now we're stuck because nothing really takes advantage of a 32-core processor, you can't make one work at 3-4GHz constantly without stupendous cooling, and we have nowhere to go. Compiler optimisations and branch prediction don't even figure, most of the Intel fixes have 5-10% impact only, it's only the worst-case loads that suffer more.

The money for anything extra goes on GPU now if you want to actually do anything useful - whether that's gaming, mining or actual serious calculations. 1000s of tiny cores running at GHz.

But we plateaued years ago, and nobody is really able to do much about it. Maybe it's time we started writing software that doesn't require some hundreds of megabytes of code to draw a couple of windows on the screen, especially now that we can just throw OpenGL data at the screen directly.

Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks away from crash

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The Nasty Little Truth About Deep Learning

Machine learning of a trained network tends to have a logarithmic pattern - it learns quickly at first, then quickly plateaus and it takes a lot to "untrain" it onto something else.

This is why most of these "AI" things peak with basic functionality, because after 100 trainings it might get the idea, but between 100,000 and 1,000,000 trainings it improves very little indeed. And it also becomes MUCH harder at that point to change what it was trained on... because it may have reinforced the wrong parameters a million times and you can only feed it a handful of corrections.

This is why Google doesn't have just one massive AI that they use to do all their AI jobs (e.g. "Viki"). They start fresh each time and retrain only on what they want it to know. Because when the plateau strikes, it's no longer any fun to beat your head against a brick wall. Their Go robot loses at poker, their poker robot loses at Go.

It's also the reason that PhD students in the area can operate - train a model, get it to do something interesting, realise that you can't make it do any more, write up paper, flee for some high-paid job.

Anything sold to you as "AI" today is lying. It's not even close. It's just a huge statistical model with heuristics to tune it to what you want it to do. It's not intelligent in any way, it's just seeking statistical similarities with its training material. The more training material, the slower, harder and less reliable a particular result will be (e.g. train it to see bananas and apples and it will start to classify things in the wrong group, as opposed to just training it to see bananas and saying yes/no). And the best bit - being "AI" you have absolutely no idea what criteria it's judging on. You train it, sure, but is it just looking for "image is mostly yellow" or "image has mostly yellow in the middle" or "image has a curve" or what? You have no idea the hidden criteria it's associating with the image of the bananas you're training it on. Which means you have no idea how it will react to any one image, that you have to counter-train it (i.e. give it lots of things that are not bananas), and you will also find it very difficult to modify its behaviour later on if it turns out to not be looking for what you think.

Pretty much, there's not much difference between what people are pushing as "AI" and a Bayesian spam filter. Sure, they're useful. But they are far from reliable or predictable. And at the end of the day it takes a human to feed it enough data (not just emails but "This was spam", "This wasn't spam") to actually get close to useful, and then it can be easily undone by anything it's not encountered before.

That's a worrying facet for a machine that's driving your car in the real world. Pretty much if a UFO were to park itself on the M25, people would still recognise it as a hazard and know how to stop their cars safely. "AI" like this won't necessarily, and you have absolutely no way to tell what it'll do until the day it happens.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Darwin Robbed Again

Well... pretty much if you want to pass EuroNCAP that's a necessity.

This is why everyone moans about modern cars "being made of paper" in terms of deformability. That old Volvo might survive a tumble off a tower-block but if you're inside it you won't.... you'll be killed by that immovable object surrounding you.

Modern cars disintegrate so that by the time your body hits something, you're only really going from about 30mph to nothing instead of 60mph to nothing. Short of head-on 70+ vs 70+mph, or anything out of the ordinary (i.e. a car front coming up into the windscreen itself), you stand a damn good chance of walking away or at the very least being alive enough to worry about the insurance.

One of the things I did when I bought my last car was watch the EuroNCAP crash videos of it. They can be very telling as to the build quality of the car and quite why your windscreen supports are thicker than you have ever seen on an old car.

P.S. I drive a Ford Mondeo... rated 5-stars. Watch the videos on their page. You and your passengers / kids end up in a cushion of airbags. Who cares about the car, we can walk away when some idiot like this ploughs into us.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The Nasty Little Truth About Deep Learning

No, but they do claim semi-autonomous driving.

And also:

"As of 2017, Autopilot included adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, emergency braking, Autosteer (semi-automated steering), AutoPark (parallel and perpendicular parking) and Summon (recalling the vehicle from a parking place)."

Seems that the emergency braking isn't really up to scratch, nor Autosteer. Whether or not "Autopilot" is enabled, why does a car that CAN detect it's about to hit a large stationary fire truck at 60mph allow such an action when it clearly should have been able to brake in time?

And, sorry, but the OP is right... such things are not intelligent in any way, shape or form which is why even with Autopilot on they don't see large trucks crossing the road ahead and plough straight into them. It's not been trained on the exact circumstance, so it's reaction to it is largely arbitrary. And yet they're claiming you can let it safely "autosteer", "autopark", "drive itself from a parking place", "brake in an emergency", "tell if you're straying out of a lane", and "change speed to match surrounding cars" as per the list above.

No matter what you might think, the technology isn't there and companies like Tesla are complicit in letting people believe it is. We do not have AI, or anything vaguely intelligent enough to do these things. They're all just "trained" heuristical systems that are pretty much unpredictable in any given situation.

Firms pushing devices at teachers that let kids draw... on a screen? You BETT

Lee D Silver badge

They know that already.

They all have iPads or smartphones. By comparison a Raspberry Pi is a toy. P.S. you think they care that they can use a machine, if it can't play GTA V and Overwatch?

I work in IT in schools, always have. RPi are a waste of time. MicroBits are even worse. Pretty much everything they want to do, they know they can do on an iPad, Android phone, or portable PC. They already don't care about OS or architecture.

What they do know, though, is that you need a decent PC if you want to do anything serious, especially 3D or video editing, and everything else is so damn powerful that a RPi 3 is just a joke. They might like plugging it in, that's about it. It's not a wonder-toy to a kid that has even the most basic Samsung Galaxy (which will be smaller, faster, have integrated 3D, run on Android, and probably is in their pocket). And yet, you still need monitors to plug into, power supplies, kits of parts, keyboards, etc. And a space to do it in. Gosh, if only every school had, like, a suite in which they had all that kit and workspace already? You have to shove the PC out of the way to play with the RPi or add in so many other parts you could buy them all an iPad / Chromebook each anyway.

Guess what app they all try to install on their iPads? Word. We don't even give them Office 365 but they all expect to open things in Word by default even on non-MS platforms. They are completely platform-agnostic, but they "know" they need Word.

So, sorry, but the RPi's aren't all that interesting. And staff don't know how to utilise them. And apart from a little computing lesson where you learn to plug it all in, everything they do is better off done on a real computer.

If you go to BETT, they were pushing MicroBits one year. Literally no products - just pushing what they could do but you couldn't buy them. And a few years before it was RPi. No lesson plans, no teacher assistance, just boxes of gadgets. Both are now almost invisible, like the 3D printers before them, visualisers before that, etc.

This stuff isn't for education, which has entirely different priorities to you and I (and I work in private education with kids who go to Eton... they literally lose all interest in RPi etc. within minutes but will happily build their own drone aircraft). Coding? Yeah, they "did that". Whether it was Scratch or Python it consisted precisely zip of their lessons over even their primary education and then that was done. Why? Teachers who can't code and who have huge curricula which includes a lot more than coding. Or playing about with little gadgets.

To be honest, you could run a school without visible Windows. I have seen one or two attempt it, reverted one (reluctantly being a massive Linux fan, open-source programmer, etc. myself but they really messed it up), and I tell you that you could run the kid-side easily on anything you liked. Google GSuite for Education, a handful of third-party website subscriptions, any decent browser and that's 99% of what you need for the kids to get through all they ever need to - including testing and assessment. Guess how many go that route? Very, very, very few. Why? Teachers ask for Windows and Office. Why? 10 years ago, those teachers were the same kids with the teacher who was baffled by Windows 7 and who would have stayed on XP forever. Trace it back enough and you still see things like "Word is the word-processor, Excel is the spreadsheet" as if nothing else exists.

Sorry, but education is a market based on teaching things that you're told to teach, when you were never taught them yourself, so they stick exactly to what they know and can pick up quickly themselves. Just try explaining app vs website to most teachers and you could be there for hours. Especially when you then demonstrate that "the iPad app we must have" won't run on Android / Chromebook / Windows.

Education doesn't care about your RPi's precisely because - as I warned at the time - RPi doesn't care about the teachers. Look around and only OTHER TEACHERS provide resources to use for them linked with the UK national curriculum in any way. And that curriculum changed smack-bang as RPi came out. Teacher won't touch that without paying £1000 for the "pack" of RPi's with massive book of lesson plans and a 3 hour course for their entire staff with a support line the other end. That, pretty much, doesn't exist.

Until then, every school you see will be paying for Microsoft licensing annually (but we pay for one copy of Windows/Office per full time teaching employee only anyway), still buying iPads AND Chromebooks AND PCs AND other stuff, and then still complaining Word can't run on a RPi. And your kid will come out thinking half-a-dozen copy-pasted lines of Python is "programming".

P.S. I was also an early tester for RPi 1.0... including diagnosing the Ethernet/SD card USB bus saturation issues with Broadcom directly. My RPi is gathering dust in the attic, as are the school ones at every school I've worked at since they came out.

Take a former NSA head hacker, a Raspberry Pi, weird Kiwi radios and what do you get?

Lee D Silver badge

Possibly the most already-done-a-million-times and boring thing you could do as a geek/hacker.

I mean, yeah, sure, it's fun for him. But even with the FM bit this isn't new to anyone. There are guys all over the Internet doing this, and a million times better, and with the same kind of local broadcasting of accompanying music.

My first question is not about the radio, as such, but: Did he pay for the broadcast rights and the right to use the Peanuts imagery? Probably not a good idea to tell everyone at a conference / on the Internet that you did that stuff as there's almost certainly a rightsholder waiting to complain somewhere once they see that.

I was much more intrigued by the DVDs you can get and project on-loop onto a thin bit of fabric in the window to do everything from showing a mystery Santa leaving presents to scary ghosts walking past the window every now and then - all synced together for each window in the house.

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

Lee D Silver badge

I have:

- Two Video Backer cards (ISA card that outputs a recordable video stream that you can then play-back to get about 2Gb of data backups on a 3 hour VHS tape).

- A SyQuest Sparq drive (think ZIP drive, but with 1Gb disks and a parallel port interface / DOS driver).

- A serial cable that is about 20m long and is made up of every possible combination of M/F/25/9-pin serial cables in series, plus gender changers and adaptors (this once was the basis of a two-computer "Ethernet" network using an old DOS packet driver that nobody can find any more - used to play IPX and TCP/IP games over it under DOS / Windows 3.1).

- A similar chain of USB, mini, micro, full-size, male, female, etc. adaptors/gender changers.

- A floppy drive for an IBM Thinkpad from out of the Ark (a 360? Which I still have)

- A modem-based VPN device that you could dial into to talk to local Ethernet / serial lines, I think it's datestamped 1980-something.

- PS/2 and even serial ball-mice (I kept the serial as you could play The Settlers in DOS split-screen if you had a PS/2 and a serial mouse)

- A Trust-branded VGA -> TV convertor that can just about make a mess of putting 800x600 VGA into a standard coax signal if you don't mind missing half the screen and it being all wibbly.

- A box full of proper non-Winmodems, which I still use to form the basis of fax->email systems in places that still have analogue lines. Sadly these are on the verge of retirement, however.

- A PCMCIA GSM data card. Pretty much far too expensive to use even when it was possible, but did at one point form part of a PCMCIA-only laptop that was a router / gateway / firewall for my home network - PCMCIA 56K modem, PCMCIA 10BaseT Ethernet, PCMCIA GSM data card, all in the same machine and it managed my home network for years, after booting from a single floppy (Freesco/Linux).

- Bags of other stuff.

Scumbag who tweeted vulnerable adults' details is hauled into court

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Threatened the ICO ?

"or could reasonably be expected to be aware of it "

Such as, for instance, ensuring that you run industry-standard software to stop unauthorised devices on the authorised machines.

"Reasonable" in terms of data protection has included - in case law - things such as reasonable preventative measures to ensure compliance with your verbal "don't do that"'s. Saying "I told them they should have a password" just doesn't pass muster any more. You have to show that you've enforced that and are aware of those exceptions. To not do so is negligent in your data handling duties.

It's also been a factor that you can say "we don't allow that" until the cows come home - but the courts only consider it reasonable if you're also CHECKING that it's not possible, and that people aren't doing it. You can only do that by putting in, for example, device and data control systems. Courts deem that to be the "reasonable" measure, not "Oh, well, it's Sheila, we did tell her".

The fact is - this is all a consequence of DPA case law, where the definition of reasonable has been decided by a judge but not written back into law. GDPR is an attempt to codify that case-law back into actual words.

Hint: An NHS trust was fined for NOT BEING ABLE to prove that a lost disk had been encrypted before it left the building. Not that it WASN'T encrypted. Not that it wouldn't have been expected to be encrypted. But that they couldn't definitively prove that it WAS encrypted BEFORE it was posted and then lost. Case law is not on the side of liberal interpretations of "reasonable" here. Even *potential* for someone *unauthorised* (i.e. not necessary for their job) to see any amount of personal data that they don't need to see as part of their job, can be interpreted as a breach. i.e. that there was even a brief window of opportunity for Fred Bloggs who works for the company to have BEEN ABLE to log into something that might have given him more info than was strictly required for his job? Fineable offence, including personal liability of whoever facilitated that.

You can scream "but nobody ever would prosecute for something so minor" until you're blue in the face, because that's not how the courts are interpreting it.

Take an example: Some minimum wage phone operator sells on your customer list to a rival before they leave. It's STILL a breach of the DPA, even if you told them not to do that, even if their doing that was a breach of everything in question, and even if they were authorised access to those records as part of their job. You will still be fined, as a company, for a) it happening, b) allowing it to happen without a reasonable safeguard against it. It really doesn't matter what THEY do, which is the essence of the whole problem. They just shouldn't have access to anything they could do that with, or be able to splat that information about willy-nilly and you need to show reasonable attempts to control that data (which doesn't wash if you just say "Oh, well, they had an Excel of every email address"... the next question the court asks is "Why?" and "How did they get that?")

Linux's Grsecurity dev team takes blog 'libel' fight to higher court

Lee D Silver badge

It seems incredibly like imposing further conditions on the distribution, which is prohibited under the GPLv2: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

It seems quite clear to me that making people pay for the software, and then denying them future updates in perpetuity should they EVER exercise any of their distribution rights under the GPLv2, is quite a bit more than "imposing further restrictions".

That's pretty moot, however, because you'd have to be an idiot to want to do business with this guy at all anyway.

Lee D Silver badge

GRSecurity / Brad Spengler

This couldn't happen to a nicer fella.

Finally his big-headedness has caught up to him.

And, never forget, he has to publicly declare certain things to work on tiny little government contracts:

https://www.collierreporting.com/company/open-source-security-inc-lancaster-pa

Quote: "Estimated Number of Employees: 1

Estimated Annual Receipts: $140,000

Business Start Date: 2015"

No matter what he says, he's been a tiny one-man operation for years. How he can afford a lawsuit, I can't fathom.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Lawyers and Catfish

The judge said that the current case can't proceed as is without being amended.

They don't want to amend.

So what they are saying is "the judge made the wrong decision" and appealing the case. Which first requires the case to be dismissed.

It's pretty much certain they're on to a loser at this point, as they're literally saying "NO! YOU'RE WRONG!" to the judge, who was quite clear and didn't have to do much interpretation to come to the conclusion they did (i.e. it is an opinion, and you can't be libellous unless what you're saying is provably false). They can't prove the statements false, hence they can't continue with the libel claim, but they want some "different" answer.

The best bit is at the bottom, though... no matter whether the case is dismissed or the complaint amended, there is a court-sanctioned avenue of suing them back under an anti-harassment law, with positive encouragement from the judge as to the likely success of such an action.

Not only are they onto a loser with their original suit, they're onto a loser with the appeal, and in the process they can be counter-sued almost automatically no matter what. This is not just losing... this is M&S losing...